


Palace Fit for a King

by theunicornandtheraven



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Mind Palace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:56:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theunicornandtheraven/pseuds/theunicornandtheraven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moriarty transports John to Sherlock's mind palace with a plan to destroy the entire thing.  Can John get home and stop his plan in time?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Palace Fit for a King

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the BBC Sherlock KinkMeme.
> 
> This work is unBeta'd and unBritpicked, so I take credit for any errors.
> 
> Enjoy!

John woke to the sight of Moriarty smiling down at him. His body wasted no time moving from waking to sleeping, a trait left over from his army days. 

“Sleeping Beauty wakes,” Jim said. His smile made John feel like someone had him in their crosshairs.

John stood up. He swayed, and darkness overtook his vision for a moment. “Where am I?” he said.

Moriarty gestured to the building that rose behind him. “Take a look.”

The palace stretched for at least a city block. Marble gleamed in the sun, and the columns out front imitated a Greek temple. Two stone angels, dressed for battle, flanked the entrance, so lifelike that they seemed ready to leap into battle at any moment. Gold letters on the black door spelled “221B.”

“What? How?”

“Please. Like I’m really going to waste time by explaining that to you?” Jim looked skyward and made a little sighing noise that irritated John beyond belief. He tossed John a bundle of fabric he‘d been holding.. It reminded John of the time the same man had forced Semtex on him. “Put them on. You’ll need them where you’re going.”

John straightened the cloth.. Sherlock’s coat. He pulled it around him and practically drowned in it. The scarf was buried in the folds, and he looped it around his neck.

“I still don’t understand what’s going on,” he said as he dressed. Considering the circumstances, he felt calm. He’d seen worse, if not stranger.

“I suppose you know what that is.” Moriarty indicated the building with his head. John nodded. “Then you know why I want to see it razed. The problem is that the palace only lets in people Sherlock likes. They’re special. I cannot put on that coat and scarf, but you can.”

John pulled the coat around him more tightly. It smelled like Sherlock‘s aftershave and Bart‘s morgue.

“What makes you think I’d ever do that?”

“If you don’t follow my orders, Sherlock dies. I kidnapped him, too. It’s how you got here. You are going to plant this right in the center of the palace. Now hop to it.”   
He tossed a small object at John, waved, and disappeared.

John studied the object in his hand. A black sphere, it looked like a magic 8-ball except for the countdown in red numbers. Best get going then.

His breath caught in his throat when he stepped into the entrance hall. A larger-than-life oil portrait of Sherlock dressed as a pirate hung on the wall across from the door. John chuckled to himself.

He took the stairs, two at a time, taking little notice of the gracefully curving staircase and the way it split to frame the painting. On the next floor, he opened the first door to the right, labeled “Bees.”

The walls consisted of honeycombs. John ran his hand along one, and it felt rough under his hand. A buzz filled the room, low and strangely soothing.

A hexagon near John showed a film on loop of bees. He tapped it. The voice of a narrator filled the room, droning on about how bees dance to communicate the locations of flowers to the rest of the hive. It stopped when John tapped it again. He remembered watching that nature show with Sherlock during a quiet night at the flat.

He explored the room for a few more minutes, watching and listening to clips of audio and video nestled in the hexagons. Some of the information came from things that Sherlock watched or read while others had been recorded from Sherlock’s experiences.

The bomb in his pocket blared and brought John back to task. He’d lost fifteen minutes since Moriarty had thrown it at him. With no ideas on how to destroy it, he decided to explore more.

The silence weighed on him after the buzzed of the bee room. He continued down the hallway, reading titles of rooms. “Bacteria.” “Organic Chemistry.” “Thermodynamics.” He guessed he’d wandered into the science wing.

At the end of the hall, he found another flight of stairs, much smaller than the main one. If this were a real palace, he’d call it the servants’ stairs. Having found nothing useful, John descended.

This floor felt colder than the one above. John’s eyes struggled to adjust. After a moment, John spied a flashlight on a table. He flicked it on.

The walls of the passageway seemed to close in on him, and the flashlight could not pierce the dark. Goosebumps rose on his arms.

Sherlock had not bothered to label the doors down here. John passed the light over each one, hoping to find a clue. He chose one at random and entered.

Something snuffed out the flashlight as soon as he closed the door. He reached behind him and scrambled to find the doorknob. His nails scratched the door, and the scraping sounds sent shivers up his spine.. Someone else’s breathing joined his. The door. Dammit, where’s the door? Adrenaline shot through his system.

A pair of red eyes peered out of the darkness. He’d seen them before. Somewhere.

His fingers closed around the doorknob. He yanked the door open and sprinted into the hallway and up the steps. Out of breath, he sank down onto the main staircase.

Sherlock must keep his nightmares down there. John had walked into a drug-induced hallucination. The encounter left his nerves frayed and his heart thudding in his chest.

While he waited to get his breath bake, he pulled out the bomb.. He’d lost an hour of time, but if felt like only a few minutes. Moriarty might have manipulated the time to make him hurry. Or just wanted to mess with him. He was, John remembered, so changeable

John climbed the stairs when he stopped hearing the blood rushing in his ears. He wanted to distance himself from the basement.

This time he turned the other way at the stop of the stairs and found himself face-to-face with a door labeled “John’s Wing.”

A warmth spread through him, along with burning curiosity. He opened the door.

John entered 221B. For a moment, he thought that the whole thing would be a dream and Sherlock would look up from an experiment in the kitchen and ask him where he went.

Like always, he settled into his chair by the fireplace. A noise emitted from the Union Jack pillow his lower back. He flew out of the chair. A video had started to play on the pillow — the time John had spilled tea all over himself in that chair. It was the first time Sherlock experienced an incredible display of profanity from his quiet, unassuming flatmate.

He could spend eternity in this room. The entire bookshelf, he discovered, held various memories, observations, and minutiae about John. Sometimes a brief audio note from Sherlock prefaced the entries, like the one that explained how he enjoyed a particular song just because the lyrics made him think of John.

He found similar things in the kitchen and the other rooms. A recording of Sherlock worrying about Harry‘s drinking hurting him. The pair of shoes he wore on dates. Most surprisingly, the exact feel of his jumper against skin. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes after that one.

The bomb rang out again. Fifteen minutes. Crap. Still no solutions.

He tried to focus on solving the problem, but the wool from the jacket and scarf itched him. To think better, he took both off.

The lights winked out just as he’d started to sink back into his chair. He stood stock still, his bum halfway to the seat. Something scratched at the door and whined. A dog. His mind’s eye flashed back to the red eyes in the basement.

He couldn‘t run, so he scanned the living room for a weapon. The fire poker. Just as he picked it up, something hacked through the door.

The angel statues stood framed by the doorway and brandishing swords. A gigantic black hound filled the space between them. Its eyes glowed red, and a glob of drool dangled from its jowls.

The tableau broke in less than a millisecond. Each angel ran at John, and the hound crossed the room in two bounds.

John remembered what Moriarty had said about the coat and scarf. He bolted to the hat stand and shrugged on both garments. He hound’s breath was hot and moist on his face, and the angel’s blades swung down to slice his skin.

But they stopped there. As soon as the coat and scarf touched his skin, Sherlock’s guardians stopped moving. John blinked as the lights came back on.

The hound licked his face, and the angels saluted. John lowered his arm and dropped the poker. It hit the floor with a clang.

Again, the bomb beeped, more high pitched this time. More urgent.

The hound (He’d dubbed it Baskerville in his head), sniffed the bomb as John pulled it out of his pocket. Two minutes.

“I need your help to destroy this. It’s going to blow up. Please,” said John. He doubted the guardians would understand him, but he didn’t know what else to do.

One of the angels reached out a hand for the bomb. John handed it over. The angel attempted to crush it with both hands, but it stayed intact. The second angel tried to split it with the sword, but nothing broke..

Another beep. One minute.

Baskerville whined, then swallowed the thing whole. John looked to the angels for an explanation, but their stone faces revealed nothing.

The clock on the wall ticked off sixty seconds, and a faint rumble issued from Baskerville’s stomach.

Thirty more seconds passed, and the angels returned to the front door. Baskerville nosed his snout into John’s chest. John stroked the hound’s massive head until his vision faded to black.

This time he woke in his own bed at Baker Street. Sherlock had pulled up a chair next to the bed and sat reading a book.

“You’ve been stirring for a while. I figured you’d wake up soon,” he said without looking up from the pages.

John sat up against the pillows and felt for the scarf and coat. Someone, probably Sherlock, had dressed him in pyjamas. “Sherlock, what happened? I had the strangest dream-” he said.

“That Moriarty had saddled you with a bomb and sent you into my mind palace? It happened; I watched it all. He’s got some machine to get inside.” Sherlock’s expression had started as a smirk, but gave way to anger.

John searched Sherlock’s face for lies. “But everything’s fine now?”

“All fine.”

Sherlock returned to his book and gave John a few moments to process. John kicked off the blanket. He froze halfway to his dresser.

“Wait. Baskerville. How did he…?”

Sherlock smiled. “My childhood nightmares featured a monster that swallowed everything in sight. Somehow it bred with the hound. I can’t quite bring myself to delete him.”

“Monster that eats everything. Hunh. Sounds like Mycroft.”

John pretended not to notice the proud grin Sherlock attempted to hide.

“You know me too well, John.”


End file.
